Speech
by Father Paul Shanley to the Psychological Panel at the Boston/Boise
Committee conference on “Legal, Psychological, and Ethical
Issues of Intergenerational Relationships,” Community Church, Boston, December 2, 1978

Some may have been wondering how I was
faring sitting here hearing all these
remarks about Irish Catholics. I want you to know that they didn’t
bother me because recently I was converted to Polish Catholicism. In a
sense, this whole meeting is ridiculous, and I hope, a century from
now, people will look back and say, “Did they really have to have a
meeting on this subject?” Because it is ludicrous, from one point of
view. From another point of view, it is truly historic, and I have
waited a long, long time to see people gather together in a concern not
just for the boys, but for the men, and for the professionals and
relatives and friends and so forth of those involved in the
relationships such as the ones we hope to dissect a little today.

There’s no way that I can condense into
four
minutes my impressions, but I hope to perhaps get time either
individually or in the question period to talk about my own experiences
a little better than I can in the free time. So, I’m just going to give
you one instance that kind of lured me into a concern that should have
been basic to my own Christianity. But it wasn’t obvious to me until
this incident occurred.

I have had
the
privilege of being a juvenile
court chaplain, and later being a street priest working with runaways
and drugs and so forth, prior to getting involved in my work with
sexual minorities. I can remember a boy who was on the streets doing a
lot of hustling, who had come from a fine home environment, but his
hair was too long and his father had told him to get a haircut or get
out. He got out, and he came all the way to Boston, and when I ran into
him, he was hanging around on the street and living from hand to mouth.
Everybody had failed with this kid. Police officers had failed.
Juvenile probation officers had failed. Psychologists had failed.
Obviously, his parents had failed. Nobody could get through to him. And
then one night along came a man who took him home with him. I had
failed too—put me in there too. He took him home, got him off drugs,
got his VD cleared up, got him to a dentist because his teeth were
rotting from the addiction that he had to speed, got him eyeglasses,
got him back in school, then set about reuniting him with his parents,
and successfully accomplished that—without the necessity of a haircut.
I could go on listing the way in which this boy’s personality index
profile went drastically upward as a result of his relationship with
this man. And what did it cost him? On one or two occasions, the boy
was asked by the man if he would be interested in a sexual
relationship, because the man was. On one of those occasions, the boy
said no; on the other, he said yes.

The boy eventually went home,
eventually
confided the incident to his father, and immediately the man was
arrested, prosecuted, and convicted and sent to prison. And there began
the psychic demise of that kid. He had loved this man, not to the
extent that a lot of boys today are going to tell us about, or a lot of
men are going to tell us about their relationships with boys. It was
only a brief and passing thing as far as the sex was concerned. But the
love was deep, and the gratitude to the man was deep. And when he
realized that that one indiscretion in the eyes of society and the law
had cost this man perhaps twenty years—because that’s what he was
sentenced to, although he didn’t serve twenty years—the boy began to
fall apart.

The incidences that he went
through in the
police station, in backrooms, the descriptions he had to give over and
over on the witness stand, the relationship that then developed as the
other peers in his community learned about this trial and conviction of
the man—all of these things led to the ultimate destruction,
psychically, I would say, of that young person, not to mention the
obvious destruction of the adult.We’re not going to be talking
about morality
here this morning, but we are this afternoon when we get into ethics,
but simply psychologically there can be no question in my mind but that
we have our options and our convictions upside down if we were truly
concerned about the boys in this particular instance.Now, since that time, this
has multiplied over
and over and over again. That’s been my reaction, my experience of the
relationships between men and boys. So far, I have found the cure to be
worse than whatever you want to call the original operation, whether it
was sick, or cynical, or criminal. The cure does far more damage. And
that’s what I think is going to be the major impression that may be
conveyed today. I am very privileged and grateful to have been allowed
to be here. I think I belong on that side of this podium. But thank
you, and thank you for everything you’re going to contribute to my
education today.[Excerpts of the discussion]Dr. Richard Pillard
(moderator): Just to
keep there from being too much agreement on this panel, let me ask a
devil’s advocate question. Children are naturally obliging and
want to do what older people expect of them. How can you keep a
child from feeling exploited, or from being exploited, by an older
person, particularly if he’s quite young? What sorts of
protections can a kid have in relationships with men?Shanley: Just two brief
reflections. Very often I find it’s the man who is being
exploited by the boy, and sometimes I think we have to help adult males
to learn how to handle that situation. I think it was mentioned
before that many kids—in fact, most kids—are very capable of handling
themselves and they don’t get exploited as often as we would like to
think. And
secondly, and I don’t
know if Tom [Reeves] meant to imply this, but I thought I heard you
talking as if all these kids were gay, and my experience is that many,
if not most, grow up to become almost exclusively heterosexual….[In response to a question
about whether such
relationships are good or bad:]Shanley: That word
exploitative has been
used. I would like to define that as using without caring.
That’s my understanding of “exploitative” sex. I think a lot of
straight sex is exploitative. I think a lot of sex between
parents is exploitative. And I think an awful lot of parents are
predators. But whatever criteria you arrive at in deciding what
sex between men and boys is exploitative, I think you could balance
that against parents. You know, you can’t abolish parenthood, and
neither should you abolish man-boy sex simply because it might not live
up to the highest ideal.[In response to a question
about how a
clergyman can regard homosexuality as a positive thing in view of
biblical condemnations of it:]Shanley: I can very
adequately treat
that topic, and will do so with you, but I would like to reserve it
either for the ethics [panel] this afternoon or maybe together we could
talk about that, because I think we’re getting off of the
psychological, which most of the people in this room are here for at
this moment. Let me just sum up the whole thing on scripture by
saying when those scriptures were written, the authors of the
scriptures never even heard of a homosexual. They thought all
people were born straight, and for some perversity of will, some
straight people had [homosexual] acts. And that’s true.Half of American males have
had homosexual
acts—virtually half. But nobody would say that half of them are
homosexuals. So, the scriptures were written by people who didn’t
know what any fourteen-year-old kid knows today: that one in
twenty to one in ten people is a homosexual, constitutional,
irreversible, by the age of at least seven….

[In response to a question
about boys and
prostitution:]Shanley: I don’t know
of any sexual
act—this is a pretty sweeping statement, but I know of no sexual act
that is in itself psychically destructive, with four exceptions.
I don’t say these are necessarily destructive, but if none of these
four are discovered, then I don’t think an act is destructive:
force, money, sex with a person to whom you’re not attracted, or incest
between a parent and child. So, I would put money in as something
can jeopardize, but I don’t think it necessarily has to jeopardize a
person’s psychic growth or maturity. But it’s one of the ways I think
that is very open to abuse. I hope that people don’t
misunderstand my bringing this up. It might be good to make a
couple of distinctions at this point…. My experience with that
whole hustling scene was perhaps the one that led me into this
conclusion that a great number of these boys are straight and
ultimately adopt straight lives. But another interesting
conclusion I came to was that a large percentage of the johns, the
customers, were straight men, predominantly straight. Perhaps I
should define “straight” as being predominantly or exclusively
attracted to members of the opposite sex. I think most of the men
in this country who’ve had sex with males are themselves
heterosexual. So the hustling scene is not the man-boy love
scene. The two are not synonymous. But it is certainly part
of it.